Determining optimum pricing policies can be a daunting task. If a business charges prices for goods and/or services that are too high, they may chase away the customer entities. If a business charges prices that are too low, then potential revenues are burdened. Frequent fluctuations in market conditions play a role in determining pricing policies, as they drive demand up or down for these goods and services. As more of today's industries are moving toward an on-demand business model where goods are manufactured, delivered, or services provided ‘on-demand’, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep pace with assessing current and future pricing policies in light of market dynamics and other unforeseen factors.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to continuously provide up-to-date revenue and gain information for a business, thereby enabling to determine more effective and accurate pricing policies. The ‘on demand’ provisioning of manufactured goods, services etc, requires a faster reaction on changing demands. Therefore, it is advantageous if the pricing policies of the ‘on demand’ service providers change in accordance to the fast changing demand. If the change is within a certain limit, e.g. less than 5% cost increase, the change may be absorbed by a slight reduction of the enterpise's gain. If considerable changes occur, however, the enterprise then wants to get alerted prior to the change. This alert is typically performed based on a prediction (estimation) of the future, based on historic data.